In this installment of the weekly update to the Trump Russia Corruption Timeline we’ve had former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal state that this week may be the very beginning of the end of the Trump Administration as a result of the new guilty plea by Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
So I think — you know, the facts aren’t all in — but I think we very well could look back on this day, November 29, 2018, as the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency,” Katyal explained.
Katyal explained the significance of special counsel Robert Mueller’s latest conviction of Trump fixer Michael Cohen.
“And I say that for three reasons. One, what we’ve been talking about, the criminal stuff Mueller has on Trump,” he explained.
“There are two other important things going on. [Two] is the House investigation,” he continued. “Now the House is controlled by Democrats, they’ll be able to investigate all of these lies to Congress.”
“And [three] is, even if the Democrats don’t want to do it, impeachment,” Katyal noted. ‘They almost are going to have to look at it very, very seriously now because this isn’t just criminal, this is the president campaigning in 2016, and hiding all of his negotiations with Russia.”
Cohen stated in the plea that he had lied to Congress in a letter where he claimed that his work to establish a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow had ended in January of 2017 after he had attempted to email Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov asking for help on the project. All this time both Cohen and Peskov have claimed that he received no response, but now it’s revealed that in reality Peskov’s assistant replied to the email and provided a phone number for Cohen to call, which he did and they had a 20 minute conversation which ultimately led to arranging for a meeting in St. Petersburg where Cohen could meet either Putin or Russian Prime Minister Medvedev to further discuss the matter.
However, I think the truth is that the beginning of the end was months before this. I think it was when the FBI raided Cohen’s home and office and gained access to all his documents which led to his initial guilty plea for campaign finance violations for trying to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal to remain silent about their affairs with Trump. He said at that time that he performed those actions “at the request of the candidate” which was the first time that Trump was personally named in a criminal proceeding as an unindicted co-conspirator.
At that point it was already likely that Trump had a sealed indictment waiting for him after he left office. Everything else is making it more and more likely that he just might be out of office sometime before 2020.
Here’s supercut of all the times Trump claimed he had “no deal” in Russia.
The existence of the Trump Tower Moscow deal was originally revealed last August as noted here by Rachel Maddow as an effort that was led by Michael Cohen and his childhood friend Felix Sater.
Both Cohen and Sater have links to the Russia mob which go back decades and Sater actually bragged to Cohen that he could use his Russian connections to get this deal done. Two months before Cohen emailed Peskov, Sater promised that he could get “Putin on this deal” in order to get it done.
“Michael I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without greed or stupidity getting in the way. I know how to play it and how to get this done. Buddy, our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in one email, according to the Times. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
Getting “Putin’s help” to get “Donald elected” would be exactly “collusion”, actually.
Sater had indeed managed much of this project up to that point, which was the fifth time that the Trump organization had attempted to create a branded project in Moscow, and one of the major problems that they had was that Sater had arranged for funding through VTB bank in Russia which happened to be restricted under sanctions.
Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow’s efforts to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr. Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow.
If the project had gone forward with VTB as the funding source Trump and Co would have been potentially guilty of violating sanctions and that is frankly no joke.
Most Americans are probably aware that they may not engage in business dealings with nations with which the United States has an antagonistic relationship, such as Cuba, Iraq and North Korea. But many people may not be aware that the United States aggressively enforces a broad range of economic sanctions against 12 countries or geographic areas and more than 3,500 organizations and individuals. These sanctions prohibit individuals and companies from conducting any type of business with the targeted entities and subject violators to heavy civil and criminal penalties.
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Punishment for violations of the sanctions can be severe. Civil fines range from $11,000 to $1 million for each violation. Civil fines may be imposed even if the violation was committed unknowingly and with innocent intent. The majority of the fines imposed are most likely the result of corporations simply failing to recognize trade transactions involving a targeted country or SDN. Additionally, criminal penalties may be levied for willful violations and include fines from $50,000 to $10 million and imprisonment from 10 to 30 years.
Trump may claim he had nothing to do with this, but that isn’t true since he had signed a letter of intent on this deal in 2015.
Four months into his campaign for President of the United States, Donald Trump signed a “letter of intent” to pursue a Trump Tower-style building development in Moscow, according to a statement from the then-Trump Organization chief counsel, Michael Cohen.
The proposal would have involved construction of the world’s tallest building in Moscow, according to developers of the project.
The involvement of then-candidate Trump in a proposed Russian skyscraper deal contradicts repeated statements Trump made during the campaign, including telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that his business had “no relationship to Russia whatsoever.”
Up until Cohen’s latest guilty plea Trump has repeated claimed that he had “no investments in Russia, no loans with Russia and no deals with Russia.” That was a lie.
Michael Cohen repeated that lie to Congress and now he’s had to plead guilty for it. The fact is that after his phone call with Peskov’s assistant Cohen continued with his plans to travel to Russia and he also planned for Trump to follow him to finalize the deal after the Republican Convention.
During their planning Sater and Cohen had considered offering the $50 Million penthouse suit in the proposed Moscow Tower to Vladimir Putin because that would attract lots of $Billionaire Oligarchs into the building, which is probably a sound business decision — but it also happens to be bribery of a foreign leader and violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Cohen’s Russian business associate, Felix Sater, told BuzzFeed News that he and Cohen plotted to give Russian President Vladimir Putin a supposed $50 million penthouse in Trump Tower Moscow to help lure oligarchs into the project:
Sater told BuzzFeed News today that he and Cohen thought giving the Trump Tower’s most luxurious apartment, a $50 million penthouse, to Putin would entice other wealthy buyers to purchase their own. “In Russia, the oligarchs would bend over backwards to live in the same building as Vladimir Putin,” Sater told BuzzFeed News. “My idea was to give a $50 million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units. All the oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin.” A second source confirmed the plan.
This provides more evidence that the project was being rather seriously pursued with potential assistance from the Russian government, despite Trump’s presidential candidacy and despite Trump’s regular assurances that he didn’t deal with Russia. But some have argued it could also violate a 1977 law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it a federal crime for U.S. citizens and businesses (among others) to bribe foreign officials.
And it just so happens that Trump hates this law since it doesn’t let U.S. businessmen bribe foreign officials.
Trump has often derided the law. He told CNBC in 2012, “It’s a horrible law, and it should be changed.” He added: “For this country to prosecute because something took place in India is outrageous."
Trump’s disdain for the law persisted after he became president. In February 2017, according to the New Yorker, he derided it to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson:
In February, a few weeks after Tillerson was confirmed by the Senate, he visited the Oval Office to introduce the president to a potential deputy, but Trump had something else on his mind. He began fulminating about federal laws that prohibit American businesses from bribing officials overseas; the businesses, he said, were being unfairly penalized.
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“Tillerson told Trump that America didn’t need to pay bribes — that we could bring the world up to our own standards,” a source with knowledge of the exchange told me.
Trump has never made a formal effort to get rid of the law.
On June 9th, 2016 Felix Sater began sending documents for Cohen to fill out in preparation for his trip. That happened to be the same day that four Russians including Natalia Veselnitskaya visited Trump tower to have a meeting with Don Jr, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner. A week later on the 14th the Washington Post first published the news that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC email server. That was the day that Cohen told Sater in the Trump Tower lobby that his trip, and the Moscow project was over.
Since all this has gone down Trump has viciously attacked Cohen claiming he’s a liar who should serve the maximum sentence, while also claiming the Roger Stone who says he’ll “never testify against Trump” has lots of “guts.”
Point of fact, as a former member of Trump’s campaign Stone has very likely signed a Non-Disparagement Agreement which means whether it’s the truth or not, he can’t criticize Trump without potentially facing $Millions in legal fines just as Stormy Daniels would. Manafort, Stone and Corsi all also have joint defense agreements with Trump which means that everything they tell Mueller they’re also telling Trump's lawyers. It is interesting that Manafort and Corsi have both lied to Mueller and Stone is now arguing that he won’t be made to testify against Trump.
One would almost think these guys are part of a cult, a gang or maybe a MOB or something.
Katyal now says — in agreement with George Conway — that Trump has abused his twitter to tamper with witnesses and obstruct Justice..
“When you read that tweet, and when you read it next to the other one tweeted right alongside it the minute before about Michael Cohen and how the book should be thrown at him, this is not the way any ordinary investigation proceeds,” Katyal said, noting federal statutes prohibiting witness tampering. “Unless you are dealing with, you know, the mob or something like that. That is the way the president is talking.”
“The president’s defense is he was telling people not to lie. If so that would be a first, that is not the way Donald Trump behaves,” he continued, scoffing. “It would be one thing if this were coming from Mother Teresa or something like that. It’s coming from Donald Trump, whose pants are literally on fire when he opens his mouth.”
Katyal said Trump’s actions to protect himself follow a pattern “of recklessness when it comes to the rule of law.”
“The mob does it with violence, he’s doing it with pardons and with the law enforcement apparatus,” Katyal said. “I served twice at the Justice Department, and I can tell you that these types of things that are the things of two-bit criminals.”
Stone happens to also be a very old friend of Trump’s who used to be business partners with Paul Manafort and often calls him late a night “to chat.” In his recent documentation Mueller has pointed out that Stone had lied about his source for upcoming Wikileaks releases involving John Podesta being radio host Randy Credico — his actual source was apparently Jerome Corsi who had a source in London who had some time of access to Julian Assange.
July 2016
- The month after Cohen finally shut down the Trump Tower Moscow deal, Roger Stone contacted his friend Jerome Corsi from Infowars asking him to get in touch with WIkileaks and ask if they had any materials related to the election they hadn’t yet released. Corsi told him this could be subject to investigation and refused, but in fact he did make the contact with a person located in London who could reach Wikileaks.
July 25, 2016
- Stone contacts Corsi with an email titled “Get to Assange at Ecuadorian embassy and get pending Clinton emails, they deal with Foundation allegedly.” Corsi forwards this to his contact in London.
July 31, 2016
- Stone emails Corsi: “Call me Mon.” and says that he “should see Assange.”
August 2, 2016
- Corsi who is on vacation in Europe for his 25th Anniversary responds to Stone via email: “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.… Time to let more than [Podesta] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton]. That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke -- neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus, setting stage for Foundation debacle.”
August 4, 2016 —
- Roger Stone sends his old assistant Sam Nunberg an email claiming “I dined with Assange Last Night” — he later claims this is a joke and produces a receipt from a plane trip to LA, not London.
August 5, 2016 —
- Stone tweets “Hillary lies about Russian Involvement in DNC Hack- Julian Assange is a hero.”
August 8, 2016 —
- Roger Stone confirms he is in contact with Wikileaks ”I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of these documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation.”
August 21, 2016 -—
- Trump pal Roger Stone tweets “it will soon be the Podestas time in the barrel.” He later claims he was talking about Podesta’s “business dealings” not his email, although Stone had also been sending DM’s to Guccifer 2.0 the public face of Russia’s cyber hacking operation and the dealings he was referring to were with Podesta’s brother, not John who isn’t associated with that.
September 2016
- Roger Stone says on Boston Herald Radio that he expects, "Julian Assange and the Wikileaks people to drop a payload of new documents on a weekly basis fairly soon. And that of course will answer the question of exactly what was erased on that email server" — which is eventually exactly what begins to happen with Podesta’s emails in October.t
- Guccifer 2.0 sends Roger Stone a link to a blog post on manipulating voter turnout.
September 11th
- Hillary Clinton stumbles at the 9/11 memorial and the Trump campaign lets fly with rumors that she is sickly and has Parkinsons just as Corsi and suggested to Stone.
October 2, 2016 —
- Roger Stone tweets about an impending big dump of Clinton info from Wikileaks.
October 3, 2016 —
- Wikileaks DMs Junior again “Hiya, it’d be great if you guys could comment on/push this story,” WikiLeaks suggested, attaching a quote which is questionably sourced from then-Democratic by Hillary Clinton about wanting to “just drone” WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.
- Junior responds 90 minutes later “Already did that earlier today, It’s amazing what she can get away with.” 2 mins later he asks “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” that Stone and others had mentioned. [This is exactly what collusion looks like.]
- Brietbart Editor Matthew Boyle emails Stone to ask about the upcoming Wikileaks dump, about which Assange has a press conference scheduled for Wednesday (Oct 5th). “Assange — what’s he got? Hope it’s good”. Stone replies that “It is. I’d tell Bannon but he doesn’t call me back.” Boyle forwards this to Bannon with “You should call Roger. See below. You didn’t get from me
October 4th
- Bannon emails back to Boyle “I've got important stuff to worry about.” And Boyle responds about Stone “Well clearly he knows what Assange has. I’d say that’s important.”
October 5th —
- Assange does a press teleconference with reporters in Berlin and claims that he has more material that will impact the U.S. elections, but he doesn’t actually release the information like he had promised.
- Bannon emails Stone “What was that this morning???” and asks if Assange cut a deal with the Clintons. Stones responds that Assange is afraid that he’s going to be killed, but that he’ll be releasing “a load every week going forward.” Then Stone says he’s raised $140k for a “black digital campaign” through a 501(c4) and asks Bannon for contributions from Breitbart owner Rebecca Mercer essentially in exchange for insider info he’s providing on Assange.
October 7th
- One hour after the Access Hollywood “Pussy Grab” video is released Wikileaks releases the first set of emails taken from John Podesta’s account. RT and Sputnik News continue to do daily reports as another set of emails is dumped for next 30 days.
January 13, 2017
- Jerome Corsi begins to delete his emails prior to October 11th, including those with Roger Stone, and what he had forward from Stone to his contact in London.
January 31, 2017
- Roger Stone goes on Russia Today to push the conspiracy that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich is the "real hacker.” This is his fifth appearance on the channel.
May 10, 2017
May 11, 2017
August 24, 2017
September 26, 2017
- Long time GOP dirty trickster and Trump buddy Roger Stone who communicated with by Guccifer 2.0 and Julian Assange flatly denies any Russia collusion to House Intel in private meeting, because he’s plenty credible since also admits in his written statement that he had an ongoing online relationship with at least one suspected Russian agent sharing DMs and retweets between them. He refuses to share the ID of the journalist who was his link to Wikileaks and Assange, he again says when he said it would be “Podesta’s time in the barrel” he was talking about financial links to Russia, but those links belong to John’s brother Tony & the Uranium deal he had nothing to do with. He claims the DNC hack was a “inside job” from an article in The Nation that even The Nation has debunked.
October 9, 2017
October 13, 2017
- November 30, 2017
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Randy Credico, a New York comedian and political activist who hosts his own radio show is subpoenaed by House Intel because he appears to be Roger Stone’s secret go between with Wikileaks [which is based on what Stone had told House members]
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Stone asks Corsi to write publicly about Randy Credico. CORSI responds: “Are you sure you want to make something out of this now? Why not wait to see what Credico does? You may be defending yourself too much – raising new questions that will fuel new inquiries. This may be a time to say less, not more.” Stone responded by telling CORSI that the other individual “will take the 5th—but let’s hold a day.”
Stone and Corsi clearly conspired with Assange to coordinate the release of the Podesta emails, Stone lied to the House Intel committee that there was “no collusion” because his emails with Corsi disprove that, he also lied under oath when he claimed that Randy Credico was his source rather than Corsi while he plotted to undermine Credico using Corsi as his accomplice.
Like Stone, Corsi has claimed “he won't lie” for Mueller and has refused to take a guilty plea for perjury. Instead he’s gotten a new gonzo lawyer and sent a letter to Active AG Whitaker attempting to have
Mueller disbarred and tried for Treason.
“This rogue government tyranny perpetrated by a Special Counsel and his prosecutorial staff, which is designed to effectively overthrow a duly elected president by coercing and extorting false testimony by Dr. Corsi and others, cannot be permitted in a civilized society,” Klayman writes.
“Special Counsel Mueller and his prosecutorial staff, the majority of whom are partisan Democrats and supporters of Hillary Clinton, whom he has intentionally hired, are effectively engaged in a ‘coup’ against the United States and are working to overthrow the duly elected President of the United States, elected and empowered by the voters pursuant to the U.S. Constitution,” the complaint alleges.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Stone is a liar and so is Corsi, both of them have also committed perjury. The only real question is whether Stone ever shared any of this information with Trump during one of his late night calls, if that’s the case he’s in worse trouble than Michael Cohen has placed him already.
The other immediate danger for Trump is the fact that he had already submitted his written answers about collusion to Mueller, which means that any statements he made that contradict with the email trail that Cohen and Sater left behind on Trump Tower Moscow, or anything he said that shows that he did indeed communicate with Stone about the upcoming Wikileaks releases —
which he apparently denied in writing to Mueller — would be bad, very bad.
But Stone di
dn’t have to tell Trump directly, he had communicated with Steven Bannon about it as shown above and had even asked for payoff for the info from Rebecca Mercer. Bannon could easily have told Trump. Also Don Jr. was all over Wikileaks with multiple DMs during the election including one where they asked if Assange could have a pardon and be made the Australian ambassador to the U.S..
After the first Wikileaks DM Don jr. emailed Bannon and Kushner to alert them, then Kushner had emailed Hope Hicks that Junior had made contact with Wikileaks online and Hope usually printed out her emails for Trump to read - which links nearly the whole fam damily in this conspiracy. And yet we’re supposed to believe that no one told Trump about Stone and Wikileaks and that Don Jr. didn't tell him about the Veselnitskaya meeting, even though Don Jr. made a call to a blocked number right after the meeting, and Trump has a blocked number.
And then there’s the attempt to violate sanctions, the foreign corrupt practices act and witness intimidation.
Here are the daily details for this past week.
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November 28th —
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Just hours after Jerome Corsi does an interview with One America Network where he again claims he “connected the dots” on his own to figure out that the next batch of Wikileaks drops would be John Podesta’s emails NBC News releases emails from August 2016 where he bragged to Roger Stone “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps, One shortly after I'm back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging." which confirms that he was Stone’s contact with Assange. Corsi had claimed he “forgot” about these emails but in reality he had tried to delete and scrub them from his system in 2017 and this was the basis of the perjury charge and plea deal he had rejected.
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Despite threats by Trump to cancel, Russia is confident that the scheduled sit down with Putin in Argentina during the next G20 summit will still take place.
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Trump meets with GOP Leaders on his border wall strategy while still threatening a government shutdown. He also says “I don’t do anything for political gain, but politically speaking the wall is a winner.” [It’s also a colossal lie since fencing has been in place over 700 miles of the border for years, the other areas are too difficult terrain for a wall or fence, and it needs to be a fence for security reasons, not a wall.] Trump is also unhappy with the current Fed Chair and claims “my gut can tell me more than anybody else’s brain can.”
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Ivanka defends her use of a private email server and says “it’s nothing like Clinton’s” [Yeah, it is.] She said all her emails are “stored and archived, nothing was deleted and none of it was classified.” [They weren't being archived in the government system until this issue came up. None of Clinton's emails were marked classified either, it was the FOIA office who said that classified subjects were referenced by her staff after she released the work relevant portions. You haven’t released anything, and none of it has been reviewed by FOIA, yet.]
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Trump retweets a Cult45-er who posts a meme of Mueller, Rosenstein and Dems in jail for Treason.
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Sean Spicer tells Fox News that there doesn't need to be a bill to protect Mueller because there’s no real threat against him, “Dems are just making that up.” [No, we’ve been reading Trump’s twitter feed, have you?]
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Mexicans are enraged that their outgoing President is giving the nations highest honor to jared Fracking Kushner.
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Ken Starr says the “hammer is about to drop on Manafort” after he learns that he was a mole for Trump. [I think he knew ahead of time and was counting on it, the joint defense agreements weren't a secret.]
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Bakari Sellers slaps down Scott Jennings who claims that Manafort, Stone and Corsi weren’t important players in the Trump campaign. "Manafort was the campaign chair.” [He also selected Mike Pence for the VP slot just before the convention.]
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Trump claims that 3 major players [Not that “Major” according to Scott Jennings] are being “intimidating into lying” by Mueller. “This is our McCarthy era.” He claims “they will get relief.” [Will they now? Hey Sean, are you getting this? Sean?? You there? Bueller?]
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The Miami Herald reports that Trump's Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta worked with prosecutors to reduce the sentence for convicted sex-offender, pedophile and friend of Trump Jeffrey Epstein. Former Acosta protege Jey Lefkowitz and Acosta reached the agreement over a breakfast meeting in October 2007 at the Marriott in West Palm Beach, rather than the prosecutor’s Miami offices, that allowed Epstein and four accomplices to receive immunity from all federal charges in exchange for guilty pleas to state charges.
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CNN reports that within Trump’s answers to Meuller he claims that Roger Stone didn’t tell him about Wikileaks [He didn’t have to, Steven Bannon and Don Jr. were all over that. Kushner had emailed Hope Hicks that Junior had made contact with Wikileaks online, and Hope usually printed out her emails for Trump to read- which links nearly the whole fam damily in this conspiracy] and that Don Jr. didn't tell him about the Veselnitskaya meeting. However Don Jr. had a call to a blocked number after the meeting.
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Lindsey Graham says he will withhold any major vote until the CIA briefs him on Khashoggi’s death.
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Climate Scientist Katherine Hayhoe, who was the author of the new WH Climate report, says that CNN had cut an interview with her and instead gave airtime to Rick Santorum spreading bullshit about scientists having a “monetary agenda” in making their climate forecast. She also says she was bumped from Chris Hayes show three times. {I would love to see Hayhoe in an octagon match with Santorum, she’s fiesty and that would be epic!]
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The conversations between Giuliani and Manafort’s lawyer Matt Downing aren’t privileged and could be open to a subpoena, which means anything they’ve told each other could be revealed and if that means that lies that Manafort told Mueller came from the Trump team, or vice versa those lies ended up in Trump’s written answers on collusion — somebody is in shit city.
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Pompeo says there’s “no hard evidence” that MbS ordered the killing of Khashoggi. [Except that half the people involved were on his personal security team, and they called back to inform him of what was going on and they said “report this to your boss” and he supposedly said “bring me this dog’s head” and … oh fuck it.]
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Trump admits that a pardon for Manafort is “not off the table” which is interesting because he should be under the bus next to Cohen for cooperating, but now since he’s been caught lying to Mueller he’s back on the bus again?
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CIA says that WH didn’t block Gina Haspel from briefing the Senate. “The notion that anyone told Director Haspel not to attend today’s briefing is false,” agency spokesman Timothy Barrett said in a statement. [Yeah, ok, but she still wasn’t there was she?] The briefing went on without her.
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Corsi hires ‘pathologically litigious’ lawyer even Roger Stone thinks is a ‘moron’. This guy apparently once sued his own mother.
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Book co-written by WH economic advisor Larry Kudlow portrays a damning picture of Trump’s corruption with wealthy party insiders. The book depicted Kudlow assuring Trump that his much-touted tax cut wouldn’t result in deficits because “the phony numbers of Washington’s bean counters” are “always wrong.” As Chait noted, however, those “bean counters” were wrong only because they underestimated how large the deficit would grow following the tax cut.
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”Your Crazy Uncle”: Jake Tapper unloads on Trump’s unhinged treason conspiracy tweets.
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Manafort says he has no interest in attending the hearing over his broken plea deal.
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From jail Papadopoulos brags that there were supposed to be ‘large financial gains’ for him and Trump — after Trump won in 2016 [Uh, that’s not how it’s supposed to work dude, that’s corrupt!]
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WSJ reports that Manafort lied about his business interests and communications with Konstantin Kilimnik to Mueller. [I doubt any of that would be repeated in Trump’s written declaration.]
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Jeff Flake’s protective bill for Bob Mueller flames out in the Senate.
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Mueller is reportedly zeroing in on Roger Stone’s late night calls to Trump. [This could close the collusion loop between the GRU hackers, Guccifer 2.0, Wikileaks, Jerome Corsi, Roger Stone and Trump.]
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CNN's Laura Coats says that Giliuani could be prosecuted for his contacts with Manafort’s lawyers.
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November 29th —
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Trump claims that Rod Rosenstein deserves to be included in the “treason meme” he retweeted because he had picked a Special Counsel “he never should have [done that]” Then he cancels his one-on-one meeting with Putin at the G20.
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CBP is limiting the ability of aid and legal workings to report what is happening inside the Tornillo Texas Tent Camp for migrant children, but indications are that they are being held for months while going through court immigration proceedings without legal representation which they are legally entitled to having. Also the air conditioning has broken down in 110 degree Texas heat.
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California is looking at legal action against the Trump’s use of force at the border.
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Former US Attorney Joyce Vance says that Mueller already knows what Manafort and Trump are trying to hide.
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GOP Rep Thomas Massie tweet sarcastically asking if people have a right to free food. #FoodStampsforAll? [The answer is yes — they do. Also a right to health care and shelter because it’s all under the subheading — Right To Living.]
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Daily Beast reports that Joel Zamel's media influence company Psy Group stocked with former Israeli intelligence agents not only kept contact with Rick Gates during the campaign, but also kept in contact with Erik Prince, Donald Jr. and George Nader.
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Former neo-Nazi reveals to CNN how Trump emboldens white nationalist culture of hate. He then explained how Trump’s infamous declaration that some of the Charlottesville racists were “very fine people” emboldened some of his cohorts. “Some of them were real happy about it,” he said of Trump’s statement. “Others in the movement, they got angry at Trump — Trump wasn’t anti-Jewish enough, he wasn’t doing enough for white nationalism.”
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Michael Cohen reaches a plea deal with Mueller for making false statements to Congress about contacts he had with Russian nationals during the 2016 campaign and he’ll offer new ‘testimony potentially damaging to Trump’. [Welp, I was wrong about that one although he still doesn't yet have a cooperation deal.] He admits in court that Trump Tower Moscow negotiations continued until June 2016 — and Trump knew.
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U.S. Attorney Kendall Coffey says that Cohen’s deep knowledge of Trump’s business activities should terrify the president in terms of what he could provide to investigators. [Yep.]
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Deutsche bank offices in Frankfurt are raided in a money laundering probe.
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Trump slams MIchael Cohen for his guilty plea — you think that’s what he wanted to do? — claiming that he’s a “weak person and not a very smart person” and that he “lied to investigators” for a lesser sentence. [Well, we can’t say that yet because he hasn’t been sentenced and he also hasn’t really said that much that we didn’t know yet.] “When I’m running for president that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to do business,” Trump said. [Actually yes it does if you don’t want to prosecuted for corruption, bribery, violating the Logan Act, violating ethics rules, the emoluments clause and sanctions that’s exactly what it means. That’s why Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm, it’s why Mitt Romney placed all his assets in a blind trust, to completely avoid any conflicts of interest, you dolt!]
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Craig Unger who wrote a biography of Trump’s long relationship with Russian gangsters going back to 1980’s says that most of the GOP leadership is also been compromised by Russian money.
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Rep. Richard Schiff says that Cohen’s guilty plea is a verification of their suspicions that other witnesses were untruthful. He vows to send all the transcripts of everyone who was interviewed by House Intel to Mueller once he is officially chairman in January, multiple criminal referrals have already been made.
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Sen. Tim Scott pledges to vote against bigoted voter suppresionist judicial nominee Thomas Farr, which without the support of Jeff Flake is essentially doomed.
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Comey files a lawsuit to quash his House Intel subpoena.
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Trump is reportedly “spooked and distracted” as his staff attempt to prep him for the upcoming G20 summit.
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Ari Melber wonders of Trump and Russia have joint defense agreement. ‘They used the exact same fake cover story’. [Dmitry Peskov lied about not responding to Michael Cohen inquiry about the Trump Tower Moscow deal, but it now turns out that his assistant emailed him, they spoke on the phone and they had scheduled a meeting for first Cohen and then Trump to meet Putin.]
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Neal Katyal says Democrats have to look at impeachment ‘even if they don’t want to’:.
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Cohen’s friend Donnie Deutsch says “Russia is just the tip of the iceberg and Saudi money will be found next.”
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Trump defenders downplay the new Cohen Plea: “It’s Just Perjury.” [It’s just perjury about trying to make an illegal business deal with a country that was also illegally trying to rig our election for the guy offering the deal.]
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Cohen’s partner in the Trump Tower Moscow project Felix Sater tells Buzzfeed that the two of them had planned to offer Putin the $50 Million penthouse in the proposed tower because it would help sell other apartments in the building to other Russian oligarch’s. Buzzfeed reporter Anthony Cormier tells Rachel Maddow that there is a “nexus between the Trump Tower Moscow project and the Russian hacking during the election.” Maddow argues how Trump’s written answers to Mueller may have doomed his Impeachment Trial if they also repeat Cohen’s lies to Congress. [Which they might since he was asked about the Trump Tower deal specifically.]
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Former CIA agent Bob Baer says that Trump was the “perfect dupe” for Putin and that’s why Russia had to make him win.
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Trump claims that he “Lightly persued” the TTMoscow deal which was “total legal and totally cool” […when it was really totally a conflict of interest.]
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Former FBI Counter Intelligence officer says that Trump behaves essentially “like a mob boss.”
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Trump’s demand that asylum seekers wait in Mexico may turn on legal “contiguous land” clause in immigration law which may allow for migrants to use teleconferencing to pursue their claims while remaining physically in Mexico — although this may violate International asylum law.
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November 30th —
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House Democrats unveil HR 1 which will increase access to early online voting with national registration, require Presidential candidates to reveal their tax returns, and establish a Supreme Court ethics code. [Yep, those are all on target.]
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Former DOJ Spokeman Matthew Milller tells Morning Joe what he thinks of Trump’s response to Cohen’s guilty plea: “He’s talking like he’s the head of a drug cartel.” [Well, of course since technically he’s the head of real estate money laundering scheme for Russian Cybercrime and Drug Cartels.]
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Morning Joe produces a supercut video of Trump falsely denying he had any deals — or even any potential deals — in Russia during the 2016 campaign.
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Rawstory produces a list of all the people indicted, pleaded guilty and convicted so far in the Mueller Probe.
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Alan Dershowitz is linked to Alex Acosta’s Jeffrey Epstein plea deal scandal.
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Yahoo News reports that Mueller has been asking questions about Don Jr. and Ivanka’s involvement in the Trump Tower Moscow project. Junior testified that to the Senate that he was only “peripherally” involved and had essentially tried to confirm Cohen’s original lie about the project ended in Jan of ‘16 although he remained fairly vague, but Ivanka had helped pick the architect for the building.
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Kate Balduan’s CNN panel erupts into laughter over Trump’s Russia corruption: ‘Sounds like a bribe to me!’.
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Huckabee-Sanders lashes out at Mueller’s ‘Witch Hunt Hoax’ for undermining US relations with Russia. [He really, seriously doesn’t fracking care about that and if he did, he should be removed for a Hatch Act violation.]
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Trump while at the G20 in Sao Paolo, signs NAFTA/TPP 2.0 with Mexico and Canada, which now needs to be ratified by Congress. Trudeau calls it the CanMxUS deal instead of USCanMx because of course he can. Trump, Ivanka and Mnuchin exchange pleasantries with MbS. Then the WH counters Russia saying “there is no scheduled pull aside” for Trump and Putin to meet.
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Megan McCain and Abby Hunstman get into a shouting match — shocker — over their famous dads compared to Trump. [You should invite Ivanka next time, but since she never speaks above a horse whisper — we might not hear her.]
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Corrupt Asshole Ryan Zinke smears Rep. Raul Grijalve (D-AZ) as a drunk in response to an op-ed where Grijalva calls for him to resign. Grijalva brushes couner-attack off: “The allegations are serious.”
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Bloomberg reports that Acting AG Matt Whitaker told an FTC investigator that he “never emailed or wrote to consumers” on behalf of World Patent Marketing (WPM), a company that was shut down this year for being a “scam” in the words of the FTC and this was misleading them before WPM was eventually shutdown for their mistreatment of customers.
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Federal Judge Thomas Hungar hears arguments over Comey’s lawsuit to prevent subpoena to be interviewed privately by House Judiciary.
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Victims testify at the Charlottesville Rally Trial. “Hymns turned into screams.”
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Former Federal Prosecutor Joyce Vance says that Trump’s Moscow Tower deal with potentially illegal even if it was never completed because offering Putin the gift of a $50 Million penthouse is illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which prohibits Americans from bribing foreign officials in pursuit of a business relationship.
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Pence deletes a picture of himself with a Cop wearing “QAnon” flair.
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WaPo discovers that over the course of many comments Acting AG Whitaker has said that Trump’s behavior is “unlikable”, “outlandish” and even “dangerous” and suggested that he should release his tax returns. He’s also agreed to answer questions by House Judiciary when Dems take over in January.
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NY Observer’s John Schindler — was is a former NSA Analyst — says Trump is more afraid of Putin than Mueller.
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Admiral John Kirby says that Putin now sees Trump as ‘damaged goods’.
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Former President George H. W. Bush dies at age 94.
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December 1st —
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December 2nd —
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December 3rd —
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George H.W. Bush’s body arrives in Washington to lay in state in the Capitol.
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Trump claims he made a deal with China to reduce auto tariffs, he also claims Farmers will be a “very BIG and FAST” beneficiary of the deal— China says he didn’t.
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Private WhatsApp text show that Khashoggi had been working to use a “electronic army” to promote human rights in Saudi Arabia and that this had been discovered by the regime due to a hack by an Israeli security firm NSO group which has sold it’s spyware to the Saudis.
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Avenatti and Stormy Daniels work out their differences after she had accused him of filing for defamation without her permission and also not allowing her full access to the crowd sources funds that had been generated for her. Meanwhile Trump’s lawyers want her to pay $350,000 worth of their legal fees — which is ridiculous because she’s been winning and also probably means Trump hasn’t paid them anything yet.
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Trump is now complaining about the cost of the “arms race” after he was just bragging about increasing military spending. He also tries to block discovery on his emoluments case, had apparently mumbled “Get me out of here” while onstage with the President of Argentina, wandered off randomly while onstage with Netenyahu, and claims he wants a “Full and Complete Sentence” for Cohen who is cooperating but argues that Roger Stone has “guts” for resisting Mueller. [“How much more like an addled distracted mob boss does he have to get?]
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NDA’d Trumpshill Matt Schlapp claims Mueller “has no case” despite Cohen’s latest guilty plea which yet again directly implicates Trump in another felony. He claims there needs to be a time limit and a budget limit on these investigations. “He’s had over a year now, the American people are tired of this. Show us what you got, put your cards on the table.” [That’s not how ANY investigation ever works, certainly not the Unibomber or the Green River Killer or for that matter Benghazi.]
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Emails indicate that Trump’s Mar-A-Lago buddies are influencing VA policies.
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John Podheretz says on MSNBC that Trump’s conduct points to collusion, but that Trump’s #Cult45 will never believe it.
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Salon points out that Cohen’s testimony and statements are tearing down Trump house of lies.
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WH sources says that Trump prison and justice reform efforts were just intended to cause a distraction during the Midterms.
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Jerome Corsi and his new nutbag lawyer file a complaint with Acting AG Matt Whitaker to have Mueller disbarred and tried for Treason. [Well, I have to say that’s bold — stupid, deluded and pointless, but bold.] “This rogue government tyranny perpetrated by a Special Counsel and his prosecutorial staff, which is designed to effectively overthrow a duly elected president by coercing and extorting false testimony by Dr. Corsi and others, cannot be permitted in a civilized society,” Klayman writes. [Yeah, whatever man.]
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George Conway says that Trump’s tweets about Cohen and Stone are “witness tampering.” [Yep.]
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Ryan Goodman of Just Security provides an 18 page document of lies by Trumpsters about their dealing with Russia.
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Salon points out that the funding for Trump Moscow Project was the sanctioned Russian VTB Bank, which means the deal would’ve been a violation of Crimea sanctions. [Which isn't news, but it bears repeating.]
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Yale psychiatrist says that Trump fans are driven by emotional impulses that most of us grow out of by age five.
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Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) says that during his House testimony Don Jr. refused to answer questions about his discussions with Trump by asserting “Father-Son privilege” which is not a legal thing.
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Republicans are going to let the Violence Against Women Act expire as they shamble out the House door.
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December 4th —